Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk!
This is the fourth of five resolutions adopted unanimously by the Eighth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), held September 26–29, 2026, in full:
1. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) demands the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), who was sentenced on August 10, 2026, to 15 years in prison by a district court in Pervomaisk, in the Nikolaev region. The sentence includes the confiscation of his property and the destruction of his socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents—methods of a fascist regime. Bogdan, whose health was poor at the time of his arrest in 2024, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment. A 15-year sentence in a Ukrainian prison is a death penalty.
2. Bogdan was convicted of “high treason.” The sole evidence consisted of six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and his communications with the editors who published them. These writings make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to the capitalist regime of Vladimir Putin, while calling for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against the war and the system that produces it. The court has criminalized this principled socialist and internationalist position.
3. The verdict is for a thought crime. The court outlawed Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and celebration of Nazi collaborators implicated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. Independent forensic linguistic analyses found no evidence in Bogdan’s writings of support for Russian aggression. This ruling exposes the fraud of NATO propaganda, according to which the war is being fought in defense of “democracy.” Ukraine is a dictatorship, ruled by a president whose term expired in May 2024 and who governs by decree under permanent martial law without elections.
4. The government of Volodymyr Zelensky is carrying out this attack to silence and intimidate growing opposition to the war. Over 300,000 soldiers have been prosecuted for desertion. Sixty-six percent of Ukrainians favor a negotiated end to the war. Left-wing politics has been outlawed, opposition parties banned and the WSWS has been prohibited in Ukraine since June 2024. The Zelensky regime is intensifying repression while preparing for the direct entry of NATO powers into the war.
5. The SEP condemns the deliberate blackout of Bogdan’s case by the corporate Western media. This conspiracy of silence is a conscious act of war propaganda, aimed at suppressing any information that contradicts the official narrative of a war for democracy. In Australia, this blackout is sustained while the Albanese Labor government ranks among the largest non-NATO backers of the imperialist war against Russia.
6. The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is inseparable from the broader fight to end imperialist war. The genocide in Gaza, now nearing the end of its third year, continues. The United States and Israel have launched a criminal war of aggression against Iran, the opening salvo of which included the assassination of Iran’s head of state. The US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine escalates toward direct confrontation between nuclear-armed states. And the central conflict of the epoch remains the long-planned war against China, toward which the American ruling class is accelerating its military preparations. These interconnected fronts in an emerging world war threaten a catastrophe for humanity. Ending war requires the mobilization of the international working class against its source: the capitalist system and the nation-state framework through which it organizes its violence.
7. The Socialist Equality Party is intensifying the campaign initiated in April 2024 when Bogdan was first arrested. We:
- Demand the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk and the annulment of his sentence
- Call upon the international working class, youth, students and all supporters of democratic rights to mobilize in his defense
- Encourage the widest circulation of this resolution among workers’ organizations, trade unions, student and youth groups, civil liberties organizations, political parties, journalists, artists and intellectuals
- Reaffirm that the fight for Bogdan’s freedom is a fight to build an international antiwar movement based in the working class, armed with a socialist and internationalist program, to halt the imperialist descent into barbarism.
Externally, Trump is at war with Iran and is facilitating the ongoing Israeli mass murder in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, directed at the Arab population. The campaign of anti-Muslim propaganda dehumanizes the victims of American and Israeli bombs and missiles. It coincides with preparations to resume heavy bombing of Iran immediately after the election, as well as discussion of US intervention in Yemen against the Houthi rebels.
Internally, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are portrayed as the “enemy within,” with a level of racist invective and incitement that is extraordinary even for the Trump administration. This incitement accompanies the administration’s preparations to reject the anticipated Republican electoral defeats in the November 3 midterm election: the administration’s demand on Monday that Washington state set aside the ballots of more than 400 voters whom the administration claims may be noncitizens, the suit to set aside 20,000 ballots in California and the suit to block certification in Alaska.
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Trump is the political representative of a financial oligarchy that has accumulated wealth on a scale without historical precedent, while the living standards of the population decline, that has launched an illegal war whose cost is now borne in prices and wages, and that has run up a national debt of more than $40 trillion. The chasm between the scale of the American and global crisis and the content of this election is the measure of the decline of American capitalism.
That a repulsive figure like Trump is president is not the cause of that decline but rather its product.
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Nothing in the US political crisis will be resolved by the vote on November 3. Whatever the outcome, there will be an escalation of the war and of the attacks on the working class, and the campaign of incitement will continue, because the crisis that produces it will continue. The answer lies where it has begun to emerge in France, Spain, Italy and Serbia: in the independent movement of youth and workers against war, austerity and dictatorship. What that movement requires in the United States is a political form of its own, a party of the working class that opposes both the fascist incitement of the administration and the capitalist system, defended by both parties, that has brought American politics to this level.
Millions are being plunged further into hunger and poverty as part of the bipartisan drive to slash social spending to fund war, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo and other police repression.
SNAP enrollment fell in every state except Alaska, according to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data: by close to 5 percent or more in 48 states, nearly 10 percent or more in 26 states and close to 20 percent or more in eight. Arizona’s caseload plunged by nearly 51 percent. Declines of 20 percent or more were also recorded in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada and Oklahoma, and according to more recent state figures, in Indiana, Kansas and Texas.
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Children account for a huge share of those cut off SNAP benefits. In the 28 states with available data, 1.5 million fewer children were receiving SNAP than in July 2025—more than 40 percent of the nearly 3.7 million people dropped in those states. Texas alone has 367,000 fewer children on SNAP, Florida 256,000. The CBPP estimates that nationwide about 2 million children have lost food assistance since the law took effect.
At 36.1 million, participation is well below the nearly 37 million of February 2020, before SNAP expanded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The last drop this steep came after the 1996 welfare “reform” signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, who pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” From April 1997 to April 1998, the food stamp rolls fell by 13 percent, or 3 million people, and by 2001 only 54 percent of eligible people were receiving benefits.
The collapse in enrollment does not reflect an improving economy. The official unemployment rate has been flat at about 4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Year-over-year real wages have declined for six straight months (through September). People are not leaving SNAP because they have found decent-paying jobs. They are being deliberately driven off the program.
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The administration has taken steps to ensure the consequences of its policies go unrecorded. In September 2025 the USDA terminated its annual Household Food Security Report, the government’s principal measure of hunger for three decades, denouncing it as “redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous” and claiming it did “nothing more than fear monger.” The final report found 47.9 million people, including 14.1 million children, living in food-insecure households in 2024.
Independent data show hunger at crisis levels. The Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, conducted in December 2025, found that nearly one in four adults (24.2 percent) reported household food insecurity over the previous year. The rate was 31.9 percent among adults living with children, including 16 percent reporting very low food security—skipping meals or going whole days without eating. Among black and Hispanic adults, the rates were 36.5 percent and 37.1 percent, respectively, compared with 18.1 percent for white adults. A staggering 41.8 percent of disabled adults were food insecure. An NBC News analysis found that nearly three-quarters of 48 of the nation’s largest food banks saw demand rise over the past year.
Established under the Food Stamp Act of 1964 to combat hunger in low-income households, SNAP has long been the nation’s first line of defense against food insecurity. According to the CBPP, it “kept 6.6 million people above the poverty line before the COVID-19 pandemic, including 3 million children.” It is now being transformed into a weapon of class war.
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The SNAP cuts are part of a broader assault, including more than $1 trillion slashed from Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and other federal health programs. While the poor are ordered to tighten their belts, the law permanently extended the 2017 individual tax cuts for the wealthy, authorized $150 billion in new military spending, including $25 billion for the “Golden Dome” missile defense system, and allocated $170 billion for border enforcement and mass deportations, including 10,000 new ICE agents.
The claim that food stamps breed “dependency” is a slander against the working class. Most SNAP recipients are children, the elderly or people with disabilities, and most nonelderly adults without disabilities who receive benefits work, often in low-wage jobs with irregular hours. Joan Steenburgh, a 70-year-old former nurse in rural Virginia caring for two children, told PBS News Hour her benefits were cut from $500 a month to $300 and that she may have to go back to work.
The fight against hunger is inseparable from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. The same crisis that drives the ruling class to wage war abroad—against Iran, in Ukraine, in Gaza—compels it to impoverish workers at home. The hundreds of billions spent on war and the ICE police-state apparatus are being extracted from the working class through the destruction of programs like SNAP.
Workers can place no confidence in the Democratic Party, whose program to fight the cuts in Trump’s OBBBA consists of calls to vote for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. What is required is the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood, independent of the union bureaucracy and both big business parties, to fight for the restoration and expansion of SNAP, the defense of Medicaid and Medicare, and the indexing of wages and benefits to the cost of living.
These demands require a direct challenge to the wealth of the financial oligarchy. The giant food corporations and banks must be transformed into publicly owned enterprises under democratic workers’ control, and the fortunes of the billionaires expropriated to meet social need. Nutrition, healthcare, housing and education are basic social rights. Securing access to them requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in the fight for socialism.
4. Trump administration grants visa to fascist Flávio Bolsonaro
On Tuesday, October 27, an anonymous senior State Department official announced that the Trump administration plans to grant visas to fascist Brazilian politician Flávio Bolsonaro and his family. Bolsonaro, who fled Brazil after losing the October 25 presidential election run-off to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, is under investigation for money laundering and was deeply implicated in his father Jair Bolsonaro’s attempted coup of January 8, 2023.
On Monday, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered that he surrender his Brazilian and Italian passports within 24 hours as part of the ongoing investigation. But instead of complying, the younger Bolsonaro fled to Argentina in the middle of the night where he was protected by the far-right government of Javier Milei. Sources report that as of Tuesday night he was en route for Dallas or Miami, had applied for political asylum in the US, and will meet his brother, the fascist fixer Eduardo Bolsonaro, in the US on Wednesday.
The decision to grant Bolsonaro a visa means Trump is providing Bolsonaro with a staging ground to continue his efforts to reverse the election results, which he baselessly contests. Trump has said the results are “another rigged election,” indicating that he plans to treat Bolsonaro as Brazil’s true president-in-exile.
But in a broader sense, by granting a visa to an aspiring dictator presently under criminal investigation in his home country, the US government has exploded whatever “legal” pretense it has previously used to justify its repressive immigration policies.
Unlike Flavio Bolsonaro, who has never lived in the US or enjoyed the protection of the Constitution, lawfully present non-citizens like Momodou Taal, Mahmoud Khalil, Ya’akub Vijandre, Rümeysa Öztürk, Leqaa Kordia and more were jailed or threatened with detention because they exercised their First Amendment right to criticize American foreign policy, despite their long-term residency in the country. While Trump rolls out the red carpet for the fascist millionaire Bolsonaro, Taal and Öztürk have been forced out of the country, Vijandre remains in ICE detention in Georgia, and Kordia and Khalil live under threat of re-detention and deportation.
While Bolsonaro’s asylum application will be rushed through the adjudication process, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Central and South America have been barred the right to apply to have their asylum applications adjudicated at all. Hundreds of thousands more have had their asylum applications pretermitted for minor technical issues under a 2025 precedential decision from the pro-Trump Board of Immigration Appeals. And compare the welcome for Bolsonaro to the extradition and incarceration of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose alleged crimes pale in comparison to those of Bolsonaro.
The decision to grant Bolsonaro lawful status exposes decades of State Department policy suppressing the rights of artists, politicians, musicians and their listeners in the United States.
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The Bolsonaro visa grant cannot be separated from the broader strategy the Trump administration has openly proclaimed for the Americas. In January, the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy introduced the concept of “Homeland and Hemisphere,” building on the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” announced in the December National Security Strategy. The formulation effectively redefines the American “homeland” to encompass all of North and South America, recalling the Nazi slogan “Heim ins Reich,” once used to justify the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. In April, War Secretary Pete Hegseth went further, unveiling a doctrine of “Greater North America” that defines the hemisphere from Greenland to Ecuador as an exclusive US security perimeter. The plan aims to secure the region’s lithium, oil, copper and agricultural exports for the American war machine.
The same forces that claim the right to dictate to Latin America is building the apparatus of dictatorship at home. The welcome given to Flávio Bolsonaro, coming as the administration deports and jails its own critics, demonstrates that both sides of this program are advancing together. The working class across the entire hemisphere confronts a common enemy which it can only confront in a common struggle.
5. Global index provider threatens to cut Indonesia off from international investment
A recent comment by FT journalist Robin Wigglesworth noted the rise of a “new force” in financial markets, which he dubbed the “index vigilantes,” that were “scouring the world for countries behaving badly and threatening to cut off their access to international capital if they don’t shape up.”
The MSCI has framed its move in terms of securing the operation of a free market and protecting smaller investors against the actions of monopolies. That is a fiction.
A 2021 analysis of index providers, cited by Wigglesworth, pointed out: “Rather than a purely technical exercise, constructing indices is inherently political. Which countries are included into an index or excluded … is based on criteria defined by index providers, thereby setting standards for corporate governance and investor access.”
The key term here is “investor access.” Indonesia is a country rich in lucrative resources which are dominated by a local oligarchy. It has been estimated that the richest individuals in Indonesia control total wealth equivalent to 20 percent of the country’s GDP and that five tycoons alone control publicly listed companies accounting for 20 percent of the market value of the Indonesian Stock Exchange.
MSCI is not some neutral body laying down global standards. It plays a vital role in the organisation of the flow of funds from the major economies via so-called passive investment tied to indexes. But in Indonesia access to investment opportunities is being blocked by a local oligarchy which it is seeking to break up.
6. Trump administration charges former FBI director Comey for 3rd time in 13 months
Felony charges under the Espionage Act against former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey were made public Monday, marking another escalation in President Donald Trump’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship and subordinate the US government to his personal rule.The case is part of a series of Justice Department actions against Trump’s political opponents in the lead-up to the midterm elections. These include its intervention in the Alaska Senate race, aimed at blocking certification if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses, and the search of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s Washington home. The latter is a political fishing expedition and the culmination of a multi-year and racist campaign by Trump aimed at stripping the first Somali-American congresswoman of her citizenship, deporting her or sending her to prison. Omar, a practicing Muslim, has been an outspoken opponent of the Gaza genocide and the immigration Gestapo.
The political targets were identified well before the charges were brought. As the WSWS reported when fascist Kash Patel was confirmed as FBI director, his book Government Gangsters included James Comey on a list of alleged “deep state” enemies, alongside Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, William Barr and John Bolton. In December 2023, Patel declared on Steve Bannon’s program: “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out.”
This is the third time in 13 months that the Trump administration has brought criminal charges against Comey, a longtime Republican whom Trump fired in 2017 amid the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. Launched under the Obama administration, the probe centered on alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. The Democratic Party and the New York Times made these allegations the centerpiece of their opposition to Trump, seeking to advance preparations for war against Russia and redirect mass social anger over inequality behind the foreign policy objectives of US imperialism.
The latest case concerns an alleged disclosure to the Times on October 5, 2016. Prosecutors claim that Comey directed FBI staff to speak to the newspaper to correct what he considered inaccuracies in a Reuters report published the previous day about Yahoo’s cooperation with US intelligence agencies. The Justice Department alleges that, in doing so, Comey caused classified information to be transmitted without authorization.
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In bringing the charges, the administration is reviving an allegation it has previously examined twice during Trump’s first term. According to Comey’s attorneys, an investigation led by John Durham recommended no charges in December 2018, while a second inquiry by the US attorney’s office in Washington closed without charges in February 2020.
In a video released on social media Monday, Comey denounced the latest prosecution as an “appalling abuse of the Department of Justice” and reiterated: “I’m still innocent.”
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The charges against James Comey were unsealed hours after a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had unlawfully fired his daughter, Maurene Comey, from her position as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York on July 16, 2025. In her lawsuit, she alleged that she was dismissed “solely or substantially” because of her father or her perceived political affiliation and beliefs.
US District Judge Jesse Furman ordered retroactive reinstatement and back pay through December 20, 2025, when she took another job. Her dismissal violated federal civil service protections, constitutional separation of powers and her due process rights. The ruling did not resolve her separate First Amendment claim concerning the alleged political motives for her firing.
During nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor, Maurene Comey worked on cases involving Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sean “Diddy” Combs and former Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. Menendez was convicted of bribery and other offenses in July 2024 and sentenced to 11 years in prison in January 2025.
In defending her dismissal, the administration asserted that the president’s constitutional authority allowed him to remove career prosecutors regardless of statutory protections. Furman rejected that argument. The Justice Department announced that it would appeal.
The campaign of retaliatory prosecutions expresses a broader breakdown of bourgeois democratic forms of rule in the United States. As social inequality deepens and a narrow financial oligarchy concentrates wealth and control over ever-wider spheres of society, democratic rights become increasingly incompatible with the preservation of its power. Under Trump, the machinery of government is being subordinated to an imperial presidency, with employment and prosecution wielded as instruments of personal loyalty and political revenge. The democratic shell is giving way, laying bare the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy.
7. Dakkota workers denounce Detroit plant closure: “They don’t care about us”
Dakkota Integrated Systems has announced that it will close its Detroit plant and eliminate 397 jobs. The closure, disclosed in a WARN notice filed October 19 with the state of Michigan, is scheduled to proceed in two stages: one line shuts down December 31, eliminating 205 jobs, and the second goes down March 31, 2027, with 192 additional layoffs.
The plant, which opened only five years ago, was hailed by Detroit officials, the United Auto Workers and the corporate media as a showcase of the “spinoff benefits” of the Mack Assembly Plant Stellantis opened in 2019, the first new assembly plant in the city in three decades.
Dakkota CEO Aaron Rivers told Automotive News that the company was outbid for the instrument panel work on the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango. “We wanted to keep this work, but our goal now is to just get through this activity,” he said. But workers do not accept this account.
In interviews with the World Socialist Web Site, workers rejected the company’s official explanation and said Dakkota owner Andra Rush wanted to replace the current workforce with cheaper non-union labor. They also denounced the United Auto Workers bureaucracy for keeping them in the dark and doing nothing to defend their jobs.
A worker who has been at the plant since it opened described the poverty wages that have prevailed from the start. “When we first opened, we started off at $15.50. They called us the sweatshop, because everybody got paid way more than we do,” she said. “So when we got the union, we raised the wages, and we just signed a contract in March.”
Under the new contract, the starting wage rose to $19.50, with some long-serving workers reaching $23 or $24 an hour depending on department, she said. “But it’s still not enough. We’re slaving all these hours and then they want to cut you. They overwork you for the lowest of the low. They don’t value what people are in here.”
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Dakkota owner Andra Rush is a descendant of the Mohawk tribe and founder and CEO of the Rush Group, one of the largest Native American-owned companies in the country. In 2014, she was the guest of Michelle Obama during the State of the Union address, where President Obama praised her as a symbol of the success of minority-owned businesses. The Democratic president, who imposed a 50 percent wage cut for new hires during the 2009 auto industry restructuring, praised Rush for opening up Detroit Manufacturing Systems and recruiting impoverished city residents to build components for Ford’s top-selling F-150 pickup trucks.
In 2018, Rush sold off her stake in Detroit Manufacturing Systems, walking away with millions. Today, workers at the renamed Voltava plant make $18 an hour, and many are hired through temp agencies even as they are compelled to pay dues to UAW Local 600. In 2024, Dakkota workers in Chicago rejected three UAW-backed contracts and waged a month-long strike that the union bureaucracy shut down because it was disrupting production at the Ford Chicago Assembly Plant.
The celebration of “minority-owned” and “women-owned” suppliers is a means by which the ruling class and its political representatives, Democrat and Republican alike, dress up the brutal exploitation of the working class in the costume of racial and gender progress. The workers at Dakkota, whatever the identity of the person who owns the company, are paid poverty wages and are now being thrown onto the street.
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The 397 workers at the Detroit plant are ostensibly represented by UAW Local 155. This reporter contacted the local for a statement on the job cuts but has received no response. Nothing has been posted on the local’s Facebook page about the closure. Local 155’s president also could not be reached for comment by Automotive News.
The silence extends to the very top of the union. The UAW’s national headquarters, Solidarity House, sits less than three miles directly south on Van Dyke Street from the Dakkota plant. Yet UAW President Shawn Fain and the union’s leadership have not issued a single statement on the threatened closure of the plant, let alone declared that they would fight it. Indeed, plants are closed and entire shifts eliminated in Detroit and around the country without so much as a public protest from the bureaucracy.
The workers are blunt about the union’s role. “We haven’t heard anything from the Local 155 about relocating anywhere, because we haven’t seen or heard of them in any capacity as of yet, to my knowledge,” the second worker said. “And it just makes me look at the union now as very suspect. You know, we’ve got a bunch of lazy, wannabe poodle cats, you understand, who just aren’t happy with their cozy positions out in Warren. And they don’t have to deal with any of the nuances that are afflicting workers here at this plant.”
The first worker pointed to the absence of Fain from the shop floor. “Shawn Fain, it was the first time I heard of him, when they said he was running for UAW president. And he still won, and he’s the one taking and closing everything down,” she said.
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The workers expressed support for the fight to build rank-and-file committees independent of the UAW apparatus, and for the international unity of autoworkers. Asked about the campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker who ran for UAW president on a program of abolishing the union bureaucracy and transferring power to the shop floor, the second worker responded: “Yeah, we have the power to do that. You know, I mean, the power is to the people. It always is to the people.”
He pointed to the cross-border struggle against Stellantis, whose Canadian workers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike against layoffs and the threatened selloff of the Brampton, Ontario, plant. “Oppression against one group of people, laborers especially, anywhere in the world is oppression against all workers everywhere,” he said. “You have to cut the beast off at the head and stop the bleeding before it even spreads. So it would be incumbent upon us to join in and fight with our brothers across the border in Mexico, our brothers in Canada, because we would be next if we don’t.”
Pointing to the wave of protests spreading across France, Italy, Spain and other countries, he said, “Good for them. Absolutely. I mean, let’s bring it back to the good old medieval days when the peasants stormed the palace gates with pitchforks and torches, grabbed the king and the queen and threw out their collective royal asses. Yeah, let’s go on back to that.”
The closure of the Dakkota plant is part of a global assault on auto jobs, carried out by Stellantis and the other transnational automakers with the collaboration of the UAW and its counterparts abroad. The answer is not to beg the company or the union for mercy, but to fight for the independent, international mobilization of the working class, through rank-and-file committees controlled by workers themselves, to defend every job, reopen every closed plant and transform the auto industry from a source of private profit into a public service organized to meet social need.
8. Canada: Homeless woman dies in Montreal-North: A case of social murder
The recent death of a homeless woman in a fire at an encampment in Montreal-North illustrates the consequences of a social system that has made housing a source of speculation and profit. The tragic event was a social murder committed by a financial oligarchy that enriches itself through real estate speculation, with the complicity of the capitalist state and all the establishment political parties.
The tragedy occurred at dawn on October 6 on a vacant lot behind a shopping center, near de Charleroi Street and Lacordaire Boulevard. By the time emergency services arrived, the fire that had ravaged part of the encampment had already been extinguished. Police found the victim, a woman in her fifties, unconscious outside her tent. Transported to hospital, she succumbed to her injuries.
Her family confirmed the victim’s identity as Mélanie Carbonneau, a mother of five children.
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High numbers of fatalities among the homeless population are a feature of social life across Canada. Toronto Public Health reported more than 800 deaths of homeless people between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2024. In Calgary, at least 284 homeless people died in 2025, and more than 100 in New Brunswick, a largely rural province.
The absence of reliable, up-to-date data on the deaths of homeless people, both provincially and nationally, testifies to the political establishment’s indifference and contempt for them. Homelessness is a social problem, not the outcome of individual failings or personal “irresponsibility.” It is the outcome of decades of social spending cuts and “pro-market” policies that have subordinated housing ever more fully to speculation and profit.
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Rents are too high, wages too low, and people end up homeless because they do not have the income needed to pay for housing. In most large Canadian cities, the cost to rent a one-bedroom apartment is higher than an entire month’s income for the lowest-paid workers. The result is an unprecedented social crisis and an explosion of homelessness in Quebec and across Canada.
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Canada-wide, 65,000 people were homeless in 2025 according to the “Everyone Counts” report, which itself acknowledges that its figures understate the real number.
Contrary to the claims of the political and media establishment, homelessness is not exclusively linked to mental health problems or drug addiction. A growing number of workers have jobs but cannot afford housing. In Quebec, about one homeless person in five reports having a job; in Canada, the proportion is about one in four. That said, because of decades of austerity imposed by the ruling elite, mental health resources have been decimated and many of the people who desperately need them are left to fend for themselves.
Faced with the explosion of homelessness, the response of the capitalist governments is not to house people, but to criminalize poverty and render it invisible.
According to the latest available data, of 726 encampments recorded in Quebec in 2023, 600 were dismantled by municipal authorities with the support of the provincial and federal governments.
In July 2026, the mayor of Quebec City, Bruno Marchand—sometimes depicted as “progressive” for his promotion of public transit—imposed a “zero tolerance” policy toward homeless encampments, giving carte blanche to his brutal police force to dismantle them. Echoing Anatole France’s famous phrase (“the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges”), Marchand declared: “Just because you are a homeless person doesn’t mean you have the right to do anything.”
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Homelessness cannot be eliminated within the framework of capitalism. It is inherent in a system where the wealth produced by the workers is appropriated by a tiny minority. In a rational society, democratically run by the workers who produce all the wealth (including housing), sufficient resources would be mobilized to plan and build adequate housing, in sufficient numbers and of high quality for all, according to fundamental human needs rather than private profit.
9. Australian establishment exploits attack on MP despite no evidence of political motive
Growing evidence points to the attack on Helen Haines being the result of a psychotic episode, but the Labor government is using it to denounce popular political opposition.
10. The Victorian Socialists: A pseudo-left trap for growing anti-capitalist sentiment
The VS program of pressure, protest and parliamentary reform is directed against the fight to build a genuine socialist movement of the working class amid a historic breakdown of capitalism in Australia and globally.
11. New Zealand election: Labour’s fraudulent “non-aligned” posturing in the US-China confrontation
Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins’ statement that “we don’t align” with the US against China is a lie.
12. Mass protests again grip Italy as Meloni government steps up repressive measures
Alongside war, the housing crisis and the education crisis, the protests are being driven by supply shortages and rising food prices.
13. A tale of two Chiles defined by poverty wages and billionaire clans
Two sets of figures, published within days of each other, define the social reality of Chile in 2026 with a clarity that no amount of official spin can obscure.
The first comes from the Supplementary Income Survey (ESI) 2025, analyzed in the study Los verdaderos sueldos de Chile (Chile's True Wages) by Gonzalo Durán and Marco Kremerman of the Fundación SOL. Its central finding: half of all workers in Chile earn less than 680,000 Chilean pesos (CLP), or $695, a month in take-home pay. Only 28 percent earn more than CLP 1 million, and only 17.4 percent more than CLP 1.5 million. Three-quarters of working women earn less than CLP 1 million.
The second comes from the Forbes ranking of the world’s billionaires. Iris Fontbona, matriarch of the Luksic clan, is worth $52.6 billion. Through Antofagasta plc and the Quiñenco holding company, her family controls the country’s largest copper producer, Banco de Chile, the CCU brewery, the CSAV shipping line and the Enex energy firm. Below her sit Jean Salata ($8.4 billion), Julio Ponce Lerou ($3.9 billion), the former son-in-law of Augusto Pinochet, whose fortune rests on the privatized lithium giant SQM, and the Angelini family ($3.6 billion combined).
These are the two poles of Chile. They are one story, told from opposite ends: the same social relations that impoverish the worker enrich the oligarchs.
14. Netherlands: Jetten’s war cabinet is working with the trade unions to cut social welfare
On September 29, after months of protests and strike threats, the Dutch minority cabinet of Prime Minister Rob Jetten (D66) announced the withdrawal of planned cuts to social security amounting to more than 6 billion Euros. The bureaucracies of the FNV, CNV and VCP union federations hailed a “resounding victory” and suspended every planned strike action.
This “victory” demands closer examination. The cuts were not cancelled but transferred, to return through the back door of the “polder” – the class-collaborationist Dutch tradition of settlements negotiated between government, employers and unions. These closed-door talks come as a mass movement against austerity, repression and war spreads from France across Europe, met everywhere with police-state measures.
The Netherlands are no exception to this right-wing trajectory.
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What is unfolding in the Netherlands is part of an international upsurge of the class struggle. In France, high-school blockades that began in September merged on October 17 with “yellow vests” protesting fuel and living costs: 550,000 marched, according to the Interior Ministry, some 2,400 were arrested, curfews followed, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu held open a state of emergency while pressing ahead with a €54 billion austerity budget.
On October 21 Greek teachers, public-sector workers and pupils marched in more than 50 cities chanting, “From Greece to France, we fight for free public education.” Belgian students have faced mass arrests over education costs; Spain heads to a snap election on November 29 amid mass housing protests; and German pupils are striking against conscription.
Behind it all stands the European Commission’s “Readiness 2030” plan: up to €800 billion in additional military spending across the bloc by the end of the decade. Everywhere, the sequence of events repeats itself – austerity at home sold as fiscal necessity, rearmament sold as strategic necessity, and union bureaucracies dissipating the resulting anger in nationally isolated protests.
On October 30, dockworkers’ unions in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Morocco and the Basque Country, representing more than 40 ports, have called an international day of action against war and the militarization of ports. No Dutch union is among them – although Rotterdam is Europe’s largest port and the September 4 stoppage showed what Dutch dockers can do. That absence measures the gulf between the international character of the class struggle and the nationalist framework in which the FNV and the like confine it.
The answer is not an appeal to the FNV, CNV or PRO to “do more.” What is required is the building of rank-and-file committees in every depot, port, hospital ward and government office, independent of the bureaucracy, fighting for the permanent and unconditional withdrawal of the cuts and rejecting any polder deal that trades one section of workers against another.
These must link up with dockers in Genoa, Piraeus and Marseille, with French, Belgian and Greek youth, and with German workers facing the same war budgets, to prepare a Europe-wide general strike against austerity and war. The International Committee of the Fourth International has initiated the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) for this purpose.
The September strikes proved the social power of the working class; the October “suspensions” of strikes show how that power is being contained. The decisive question is whether workers remain bound to a bureaucratic strategy of managed retreat, or arm themselves with an independent socialist and internationalist program: the fight for workers’ power and the United Socialist States of Europe. Building the Dutch section of the ICFI as the revolutionary leadership of the working class is the task these events pose point-blank.
15. Support in Greece for freedom for Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
Following appeals sent by WSWS reporters to media outlets, trade unions, left parties, artists and public intellectuals, the Free Bogdan Syrotiuk campaign has won support in Greece—including signing the petition demanding Bogdan’s release.
Bogdan was arrested by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service in April 2024. On August 10, 2026, a court in Pervomaisk sentenced him to 15 years in prison for “high treason under martial law.”
On September 21, an article covering the case was published on online news site To Kouti Tis Pandoras (Pandora’s Box), a widely read online publication with over 200,000 followers on X and over 330,000 followers on Facebook.
The piece summarized the scurrilous charges against Bogdan, noting that the “high treason” charge was based entirely on his views and collaboration with the World Socialist Web Site. It drew attention to Bogdan’s six articles that were used in evidence against him, including his speech at the International Committee of the Fourth International’s Online 2023 May Day Rally in which he called for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers.
To Kouti Tis Pandoras (Pandora’s Box) is published by Kostas Vaxevanis—a long-time investigative journalist and publisher of weekly newspaper Documento—who has been the victim of numerous criminal cases and death threats as a result of his reporting. In 2012 he was arrested on data privacy charges after he published the so-called “Lagarde List” of nearly 2,000 wealthy Greeks suspected of tax evasion following attempts by the Greek government to suppress the story.
Vaxevanis was acquitted of all charges later that year as well as in a retrial in 2013. He was a supporter of Alexis Tsipras, but broke with the former prime minister and SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) leader in 2024 after the latter backtracked on claims made during his premiership regarding alleged kickbacks received by multiple Greek politicians from the pharmaceutical giant Novartis between 2006 and 2015. In contrast, Vaxevanis has faced multiple criminal prosecutions over the years as a result of his reporting on the unfolding of the scandal in Greece. In July he was acquitted in a case brought by the judge investigating the Novartis affair.
Greek translations of the two main WSWS statements on Bogdan’s conviction were also published by the online left-wing publication kommon.gr in the first half of October following an appeal sent by WSWS reporters to Leonidas Vatikiotis, a prominent Greek economist and journalist who is a regular contributor to the website. See here and here.
Last year Vatikiotis published the book Ukraine, The Grand Plan: Even if it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented, examining the role played by NATO’s enlargement and political interference by Western powers in helping create the conditions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
An appeal for Bogdan was also published by this reporter [John Vassilopoulos] on Athens Indymedia—a long-running citizen journalism “counter-information” website where anyone can post. Athens Indymedia became a key source of news during the December 2008 protests and riots after Greek police killed teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos. While the global Indymedia network as a whole has declined since the late 2000s, Athens Indymedia still receives an estimated tens of thousands of visits a month. According to web traffic tracker Similarweb, Greece accounted for around 45 percent of all of the network’s desktop traffic internationally in September. It regularly features appeals for political prisoners in Greece and internationally.
Bogdan’s case also received significant social media engagement after the To Kouti Tis Pandoras article was shared on the outlet’s X and Facebook accounts and was re-published by other independent outlets.
The two WSWS statements re-published by kommon.gr were also published on its Facebook account here and here and were reposted by other independent outlets. This was reposted by Red Line Agrinio, an organisation which covers daily events and news from Agrinio, Western Greece, Greece and internationally.
Comments by social media users on Bogdan’s case reflect the deep anti-war sentiment in the Greek working class and overwhelming hostility to the imperialist powers, which are funding NATO’s war against Russia.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
